BEYOND
PRACTICE G R E G D E W E Y, P H . D . PRESIDENT
READY
SHORTLY INTO MY FIRST YEAR AS PRESIDENT OF the College, I had a conversation with Larry Doud, the CEO of Rochester Drug Cooperative. I asked Larry about the qualities he looks for in new graduates. He said, “I want them to be practice ready. They need to hit the ground running and be able to solve practical, everyday problems.” I have thought a lot since then about what it means to be practice ready and have had numerous conversations with faculty, alumni, and preceptors about this subject. Educating students to be practice ready is always a challenge for a professional school, particularly one focused on pharmacy and the health sciences. There is always conflict about which new subjects to include and which ones to leave out. That is especially true today when our knowledge of human biology and the very practice of health care are changing at unprecedented rates. While being practice ready is clearly important, we need to strive for something even better. To enjoy success across an entire career, you must be able to anticipate, and adapt to, the shifting demands of your profession. In other words, you need to go Beyond Practice Ready.
creating our two student operated pharmacies in medically underserved areas of the Capital Region. The first pharmacy – which opened in March – is located in the Hometown Health Centers clinic in Schenectady. The second pharmacy will open in Albany later this year. These pharmacies are not traditional community pharmacies. They are linked directly to clinics thereby allowing delivery of a wider range of health care services. Being situated in medically underserved areas provides the added benefit of helping serve our communities while exploring a broader scope of health care practice. These pharmacies will provide students from across all of our programs with a range of entrepreneurial and health care related learning experiences and opportunities. These may include learning how to run a business, the proper way to conduct point of care testing, or learning to counsel and educate community members – just to name a few. Regardless of their field of study, the students involved in these pharmacies will gain experience that goes beyond the classroom and will benefit them throughout their lives.
Beyond Practice Ready is the name of our current fundraising campaign, but it is not simply a campaign title or marketing slogan. It is a philosophy that we are integrating across all areas and functions of the College, and the Campaign is one of the ways we are working to support those efforts.
Though we are just now formalizing the rollout of our Beyond Practice Ready initiatives, there has been a long line of individuals from ACPHS who have exemplified this approach. We have selected six of these alumni, faculty, and staff to feature in this magazine to illustrate how the Beyond Practice Ready attitude can pave the way for a lifetime of sustained success.
To go beyond practice ready is not so much learning a new set of subjects as it is about developing an attitude. It is about being resourceful, adaptable, inventive, and even a little entrepreneurial.
No one knows what the future holds, but one thing is certain – change is coming. Going Beyond Practice Ready will allow ACPHS graduates to become future leaders of health care.
But how do you teach this attitude? How does someone learn these characteristics? Pharmacy education has always had a strong experiential component and pharmacy practice experiences can be transformative. That is the motivation behind
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PR ESI D E N T ’S RE PORT